


Thursday

by ladysisyphus



Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-05
Updated: 2010-01-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 19:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/789249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hardison didn't volunteer his place so much as have it volunteered for him when he was in the middle of a really intense night of World of Warcraft and would have agreed to damn near anything just to make Sophie shut up and leave him alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thursday

_5:33 p.m._

Hardison didn't volunteer his place so much as have it volunteered for him when he was in the middle of a really intense night of World of Warcraft and would have agreed to damn near anything just to make Sophie shut up and leave him alone. He vaguely remembered the details of the agreement as he opened the door and saw the four of them: Sophie at the front, bright and bubbly, dressed in festive autumnal reds and oranges and with what looked like an honest-to-God turkey feather sticking out of her hair; Nate right next to her, looking bright-eyed as he ever got but with the kind of stubble a man gets when he's so hung over he can _hear_ the blades scraping off the little hairs; Eliot behind them, looking dragged down by the grocery bags in his hands, which, considering Eliot, meant they had to weigh about as much as a car; and Parker, bringing up the rear, looking skeptically at the pumpkin pie in her hands.

"Happy Thanksgiving!" Sophie cheered, giving Hardison a hug fierce enough to knock him back a few steps -- which, coincidentally, was all the room everyone else needed to slip inside.

"H-happy," Hardison managed before turning -- without much success, giving that Sophie was still somewhat hanging off his shoulders, preventing him from bodily blocking their admittance -- to watch as the rest of the team filtered in. "Hey, uh, you know, I was going to clean up a little, but I sort of--"

"Oh, sweetheart, that's all right!" Sophie patted him once on the head before disengaging from the embrace, now that its purpose was finished. "We'll make the place lovely, won't we, Parker?"

"This is one of those girl things, isn't it?" Parker set the pie down on the coffee table, giving it a look letting it know it had better not try anything funny.

 

 

_6:41 p.m._

"I'm just saying, what kind of self-respecting kitchen doesn't have _nutmeg_?" Eliot took the plastic bag from Hardison's hands and started fishing around inside. He'd known that Hardison wasn't exactly the gourmet, but nutmeg was _basic_.

The door to the cabinets by the oven flew open, prodded by Parker's foot -- from the inside. "None in here, either," she reported, otherwise unseen.

"The kind with a self-respecting _microwave_ ," Hardison said, folding his arms. "It's all right, Parker, the little market down the street's still open. You can stop looking."

"I like it in here," said Parker, retracting her foot and closing the door with her toes. "It's private."

Eliot shrugged and tore the plastic seal off the little plastic spice container -- not as good as freshly grated, not by a long shot, but he'd already resigned himself to how cooking in Hardison's kitchen was not unlike performing field medicine. Seconds later, Sophie bustled in, her hair tied back in a kerchief that both looked like Hardison's and looked like it'd seen better days. "Has anyone seen Parker?" she asked, wielding a feather duster like a sword.

"I, uh." Hardison pointed in the direction she'd come from. "I think she said she was cleaning the bathroom."

"Oh! Well, how industrious of her!" Sophie bustled off, and several seconds later, the cabinet door opened again, this time revealing Parker's face -- though Eliot honestly couldn't figure out how she'd gotten herself in there in the first place, much less executed a complete one-eighty without anyone's having heard. _Thanks_ , she mouthed.

"You _owe_ me," Hardison hissed, but Eliot didn't think he looked angry at all.

 

 

_7:19 p.m._

The problem with holidays after losing someone, Nate reckoned, was that every minute you could be happy during that holiday, you mostly spent thinking about how much happier you could be if that person were still around. The problem with holidays was _not_ that they didn't have enough explosions. And yet the rest of his team seemed to be going with the latter theory, and ignoring his quiet misery completely.

Fortunately, Hardison's paranoia hadn't convinced him to hermetically seal his windows, and Nate tugged the closest one open, letting black smoke belch out into the air. "Parker!" he called out.

"Wasn't me!" Parker emerged from the kitchen looking perfectly calm, except for the soot in her hair. "I mean, okay, it _was_ me, a little. But mostly it was the dynamite."

"Who the _hell_ cooks _turkey_ with _explosives_?" The voice, Nate recognized, was Eliot's, but he was still invisible inside the great cloud billowing from the kitchen.

Parker shrugged and sat on Hardison's computer desk, apparently feeling no obligation to help with the cleanup. "I saw it on the Discovery Channel--"

" _No_." Eliot emerged, even more thoroughly soot-covered, and looking madder than a wet hen. "If you saw it on the Food Network? It happens in the kitchen. If you saw it _anywhere else_ , it does _not_. If you saw it on the _Discovery Channel_? Take it to the _Serengeti_."

"Oh dear, oh dear." Sophie emerged from the back bedroom with a damp cloth, taking it to Eliot's face. "...Was that our only turkey?"

Nate sighed and fished out his cell phone, pressing Hardison's speed dial code. Maybe if Nate could catch him before he'd left the little market, it'd spare him a sixth separate trip -- and give them time to air the place out.

 

 

_7:52 p.m._

The boxes were heavy and hot, and they made it hard to shut the door, but they smelled delicious, and that was all Parker really cared about. " _Bon appétit_!" she announced. "Hey, is it okay to speak French on Thanksgiving?"

"If I tell you 'bring the pizza faster' in French, will it make you bring the pizza faster?" Eliot waved her over to the couch.

"Uh, no?" Parker spread out the pizzas in a fan-like formation. Maybe twelve had been too many, she realized in retrospect, but at the time she'd called to order she'd figured that the leftovers would keep Hardison happy for a while until he cleaned up his kitchen. Besides, it wasn't like anything had been broken or destroyed too bad. It was just a _little_ dynamite.

Sophie lifted the lid of the nearest box, peering beneath it with a note of heavy skepticism on her face. "Is this ... pineapple and tortellini?"

"Did they leave the anchovies off?" Parker sighed, dealing out the paper plates like frisbees; three of the others caught them effortlessly, and Nate deflected his into his lap with his glass of scotch. "No, wait, I think the anchovies are on the one with the barbecue chicken and bacon. Or maybe I got anchovies and garlic and onions. Whatever, there's one with just potatoes and shrimp, for the picky people."

"Oh, we're gonna smell _great_ tonight," said Hardison, carefully disengaging a slice of the feta and walnut pie.

 

 

_8:49 p.m._

"Dear friends, sturdy and noble savages with hearts like lions, you have saved us from the winter of our discontent and distress, and have helped us form a colony of a more perfect union toward achieving liberty! As a show of our gratitude, we give you thanks and this fine feast, made of foods you have taught us to plant, to save us from our starvation!" Sophie gestured to the pizzas in front of her, as per the stage directions, even if they weren't exactly period-appropriate. "...Great Chief Tecumseh, don't you have anything to say?"

"You know," said Nate, righting his feathered headband from where it'd slipped down across his forehead, "history was never my best subject, but wasn't Tecumseh from Ohio?"

"Actually, the traditional 'first Thanksgiving' was shared with the Wampanoag people, whose chieftain was known as Massasoit Sachem," added Eliot, who was probably just upset because _his_ character was only known as 'Indian #2'.

Hardison resettled his buckled paper hat on his head. "You know, I don't think Thanksgiving pageants are traditional once you're, like, past the second grade. Who'd you say wrote this, again?"

"It's by a _very famous playwright_ ," Sophie lied through her teeth.

 

 

_9:34 p.m._

Hardison snapped his cell phone shut and turned from the window quick enough that his audience didn't quite have enough time to pretend they hadn't been listening. "Oh, yeah, real nice. First you blow up a man's kitchen, then you don't bother giving him privacy when he gives his holiday wishes to his Nana. That's just great."

"She sounds like a real firecracker," said Nate, twisting his mouth in the way he did when he was trying to hide a smile.

Parker poked the pie with a fork. "Does she always ask you about your underpants?"

"Does she -- _what_?" Hardison nearly tripped over his own feet.

"You know, you're telling her that things are just fine, and you've been working out lately, and you promise you're staying warm." With a twist, Parker took a perfect circle of pie straight from the middle; she brought it to her mouth, but instead of eating it, she sniffed it, as though it might be poison.

Hardison's face twisted into a frown he was sure was hilarious to any observers. "...And what part about that whole conversation makes you think she was interrogating me about my BVDs?"

"Guys talk about strange things." Parker shrugged and put the bite untouched back into the middle of the pie, then raked over it, leaving the pie whole again but obviously molested.

Eliot kicked her ankle. "Don't pick at it. Eat it or don't."

"Fine," Parker sighed, backing off but leaving the fork stake-through-a-vampire's-heart-style through the middle.

 

 

_10:29 p.m._

"Who wants eggnog?" Eliot walked out of the blackened kitchen, balancing a bowl and five cups in his arms. The bowl was the kind of plastic mixing job from any old housewares store, and all five glasses looked like freebies from nerd conventions with embarrassing names and even more embarrassing mascots -- he'd found the sexy dragon lady promoting PajamaCon 2005 particularly ridiculous -- but it wasn't like Hardison was the master of the high-class establishment here. Not a man without fresh nutmeg.

"That depends," said Nate, lifting his head from the section of the couch he'd inhabited since his third piece of apple pimento pizza and his fourth scotch. "What's the egg-to-nog ratio?"

" _Very_ high nog," Eliot promised, pouring Nate's share into a bright red cup from DeathCon 2003. Sophie, of course, had been all over Nate's drinking all night, and even Hardison and Parker had been giving him concerned looks, but Eliot knew how it was around holiday gatherings, when the alternative to being hard-smashed drunk was unthinkable.

Hardison made a face. "You use raw eggs in that?"

"Raw like a newborn baby," Eliot said, and saw Nate stop with the glass halfway to his lips. "Okay, not _exactly_ like a ... I mean, there's ... it's just eggs, it's cool. Eggs."

"You know how much salmonella is in an egg?" asked Hardison, leaning forward and sniffing at the liquid.

Under any other circumstances, Eliot would have taken the insult to his cooking hygene to heart; now, however, he just laughed and filled his own cup. "The less egg you drink, the more nog I get."

"Hey, man, I didn't say nothing about _that_." Hardison yanked the cup from his hands and took a long drink.

 

 

 

 _11:36 p.m._  
"And then he went CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP up the stairs some more, and he's like, who's got my golden arm? Whooooo's got my golden arrrrrrrrm?" Parker pulled the last word through her teeth until she sounded like a B-movie pirate. "And then he goes CLOMP again, and goes, whoooo's got my--"

"Golden arm, right, got it," said Eliot, who had turned less and less charitable to Parker's campfire tale as it had progressed. "Just get him to the top of the stairs."

"Fine, fine. So he gets to the top of the stairs, and he's all, whooooo's got my golden arrrrrrm? And he opens the door, and he looks inside, and he goes, whooooo's got my golden arrrrrm?" Parker folded her arms and sat back on the ottoman she'd commandeered as the unofficial storyteller's perch, looking smug.

Nate, who had been bracing for the punchline since Parker had started the familiar tale five minutes previous, now found himself puzzled by the silence. He waited a beat, casting quick glances to his teammates -- who, he was pleased to see, looked about as perplexed by the whole mess as he was -- then leaned forward on his knees. "So, uh, Parker? Who's got the golden arm?"

Parker looked scandalized. "I can't _tell_ you! You've got to figure it out!"

The four audience members groaned in unison and leaned back against the couch. "Aren't ghost stories traditionally a _Christmas_ thing?" asked Sophie, gnawing on a pizza crust in a way that only Sophie Deveraux could make look dainty.

"You do them at Christmas _too_?" Parker clapped her hands. "Wicked!"

 

 

_12:05 a.m._

"You did _not_ ," smirked Nate, though his words had even more of a slur to them than normal. "That was only because the bellhop was already prone to losing his keys."

From the other side of the couch, Sophie laughed and folded her arms across her chest. "I simply took advantage of an already vulnerable situation. Besides, _I_ wasn't the one who couldn't make it fast enough out of a room with _only_ three Spanish prostitutes."

"Only!" Nate gestured with his glass, spilling a little of the leftover brandy on his hand. "And they weren't just normal prostitutes. They were Russian secret agents."

"Russian secret agents? Is that what you wrote on your report?"

"Have you ever met a Spanish prostitute that could disassemble an AK-47 in under twenty seconds?"

"Obviously you don't hang around with the right class of Spanish prostitute!"

Parker watched this all go back and forth, much like being in the audience at a ping-pong match. She wanted to ask them why they didn't just go ahead and kiss one another already, but when she'd brought it up with Eliot and Hardison before, they'd both made such awful faces that she'd decided not to bring it up again.

 

 

_2:32 a.m._

Sophie walked out of the kitchen just as the white text of the credits started crawling up the screen, casting the room in an eerie scrolling white glow. She wiped the last little bit of soot from her hands and reached for the most likely remote -- then stopped as she realized the entire audience wasn't asleep. Eliot alone had made it through the entire film, and now sat with his arms spread across the back of the couch, a lightly snoring Parker cuddled up against one of his shoulders and a heavily snoring Hardison sacked out against his other. He looked at each of them in turn, and then gave her a shrug without moving his shoulders, as if to say, _what can you do?_

She smiled and stroked his hair once as she passed him, walking to the other side of the couch. With a level of stealth that would have made Parker proud, she lifted the glass from Nate's hand and draped a blanket across his sleeping body. American holidays _were_ the best holidays.


End file.
